“     … Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.”

“New Year’s Poem” by Margaret Avison.

Margaret Avison was a Canadian poet I had the good fortune to actually meet years ago.  She died in 2007 after leaving a valuable legacy to those to closely observe small moments.  Often, her poetry demands much of me as a reader so I take her words in small sips, remembering a comment made by Joseph Zezulka, an English professor at the University of Western Ontario and friend of Avison, who famously said: “Her poems were not snacks, they were full meals.”  Stuffed full of too many holidays, my writing self needs Avison, along with everything else, in tidbits at the moment.  But how necessary is the return  to words and work.

Not sure my digestion could handle a full word meal just yet,  I am also grateful to Lexington poet Sherry Chandler and one of her first blog posts of the year where she mentions “small stones” as a way to write our way into January.

There, she links to  “The January Mindful Writing Challenge: A River of Stones,” a call to write a daily “small stone” during the month of January.

What are “small stones”?  The site says: “A small stone is a short piece of writing (prose or poetry) that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. …The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product – searching for them will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings and mind) open.”  This sounds like a good way to enter back into the work after a time away.  In a testimonial, one of the people who adopted the discipline of small stones says:

“…Several times I’ve had the thought that I absolutely don’t have the time or mental space or energy to stop and notice something outside my driven daily preoccupations, to compose even this tiny ‘small stone’ of words. But I keep finding that it doesn’t eat up time or mental space; on the contrary, time stops and new space is created.”

Here’s to each of us finding ways to create new space in this our new year—the best way there is, through our words.  Even beginning with sips or snacks, we’ll soon be back to those satisfying, full meals.  And as we get our creative momentum back, those words  really will build slowly, helping us create the new year.  What an image it is:  to conjure up that whole river of words our regular work will become.

I filled a page—no problem—but when I re-read it, the idea I thought was going somewhere just…wasn’t. So I tore that sheet off and started again. Words, lines, paragraphs, a page, but again when I looked over what I had written it was disappointingly trite. Another page to tear off and get rid off. At this point the frustration really kicks up. There are so many things I need to do. I can’t afford to be pursuing dead ends. Time is precious and I want something to show for it when I set aside an hour to write during a busy day.

My impatience comes about in the midst of being busy with the new (to me) work of teaching a class on world religions. Ironically, I’ve spent weeks steeped in the spiritual ideals and common practices of a wonderful variety of faith traditions, yet it has left me in this urgent, scurrying state of mind. What’s more, one of the ideas I taught this week was a notion from Daoism called wu wei—a kind of effortlessness, or acting without strain. It refers to living your life sustained by the Dao, a life that puts you in harmony with your own nature and that of the world around you.

Daoism, as I’ve told my students, teaches that below the strivings of conscious effort is a power greater than we are, a power that we can draw from if we let ourselves. Wu wei yields access to the rich levels of creativity beneath the surface of our minds. It allows the abundant resources for creative work to move through us, so that we become a vessel for deeper and better work than we could ever accomplish with the strivings of our own merely conscious effort.

Action follows being, according to the Dao. So to focus on the busy, busy of our lives is to miss the point. Driving ourselves to act without attending to our state of being keeps us disconnected from the source of creativity. The work we do will flow most easily and be of better quality when it emanates from the source that sustains us, no matter what we call it.

If only I could keep that in mind! So I’m writing this post as a reminder to dwell in a better place than I found myself earlier, to dwell in that deeper strength and more profound creativity. Or at least to try. I think it will help with both the teaching and the writing.

May you experience wu wei as you work, too.

Poem by Snail Light

“Trust the Process,” I tell people all the time, quoting my friend and mentor, George Ella Lyon.  Trust the Process, I copied out and put up by my computer when I began to seriously give myself to writing.  Did I know what it meant?  No – not any more than I knew what it meant to be a mother when I gave birth to my first child more than thirty years ago.

Oh, I had inklings (“inklings” – the perfect word, a scribble of knowledge, a sense of what’s needed – ink – but no clear idea of what to do with it!), but I had to be taught by the day-to-day doing and failing and despairing and going on.  Writing has taught me how to write and keeps on showing me the way.

Though I had people like George Ella and Brenda Ueland, in her book If You Want to Write, to point me in useful directions, I often resisted what I most needed to hear.  Like this, from Ueland’s book:

“So you see the imagination needs moodling,–long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.  These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as ‘I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget.’ But they have no slow, big ideas.  And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”  [p.32]

Years of being told to “quit that daydreaming” had nearly knocked the moodle impulse out of me.  But on days when I can recapture it, when I can slow myself down, I find that those “slow big ideas” are still there, clothed in images as water clothes itself in towering clouds on summer afternoons.

Some of you will resist this mightily (as I did), and your poetry will be as good as it always has been.  That’s about it.  You will get a good idea for a poem or follow an impulse that works itself out quickly in line and with images or sound, and you will be happy with it, and it can probably even get published, and that is that.  “Why moodle?” you’ll ask.  “It seems a waste of time, and I’m not getting any younger.”

Let the poem belong only to you for a while.  Or, better yet, put it away after you have drafted it – even if only for a week—and then take it up again.  Meanwhile, let it stay on your mind.  Jot things on the back of old envelopes – notes to the poem, reworkings of lines, a new image or detail.  Bring these to the poem as you’d give a gift to a newborn.  Try them on the poem.

Talking and busyness fill our days for the most part.  If, by chance or design, you find some time to simply be with your writing, please do not allow guilt or untimely interruptions to draw you away.  Trust what flows into the work from beneath.  Then go to work with inspired joy and abandon shaping it!

The wisdom of this attention to our intentions becomes immediately obvious when you consider that “everyone knows the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”  Extend that aphorism and it becomes clear that no matter how bright one’s beginning, to accomplish the journey the traveller still make take each one of those thousand steps.    For some of us, each step requires a new commitment, and our KaBooM goal-setting time serves that purpose well.

This need to continually re-set my purpose is reinforced when I practice yoga with my wonderful teachers at the local Y.   There, we begin our classes with a mindful setting of our intention for that day’s practice on our mats by making our commitment physical.  We hold our hands in prayer position and place our thumbs on our foreheads, because that’s where intention starts.  We lower our hands to our hearts, because that’s where an intention begins to live, breathe, and have being.

From Sacred Source Yoga: http://sacredsourceyoga.wordpress.com/photo-gallery/ariele-meditating-in-nytimes/

Finally, our hands come back to our foreheads to “set” that intention.  When I set my goals at KaBooM meetings, I do my best to articulate goals that will live in my heart and prompt steadfast effort so that I have something of substance to report the next time we gather.

When I set my intentions for my writing work, I am taking seriously the dreams of my heart and the yearnings of my creative self.  At the root of the word “intend” is “tendre” which means, in part, to stretch.  There are times when the goals I set for myself feel too difficult, too great a stretch.  Yet by continually setting and re-setting my intention to make that stretch, the creative power available to me is a constant, wondrous surprise.

To our delight we found the library both inviting and inspiring. It’s a sanctuary for exploring and enjoying the written word, in a setting steeped in local history, culture, and art. The work of local painters and artisans is on display, and the glass wall of the local history room is etched with an 18^th century map of Mercer County. In the children’s area, little ones can climb on a limb or sit inside the trunk of a spreading Osage Orange tree, modeled on a long-beloved specimen in nearby Old Fort Harrod.

In the entrance to the library is a beautiful and dramatic iron sculptural screen, fifteen feet tall, made by Erika Strecker and Tony Higdon. Antique farming tools make up the elements of the screen, many of which were donated for the project by local farm families.

This work of art is a celebration of Mercer County, the rural landscape and culture, the labor and ingenuity of farmers. To walk into the library is to experience an affirmation of the place where it is located, as well as the value of literacy.

Mary's quilt is visible through the screen at the library entrance

This unique library, reflective of the people it serves, reminded me of the individuality of the connections between writers and readers. As writers, it is a privilege when people take up our work and read, allowing it to become some small part of their own story. Likewise, as readers, it is a gift to have access to a world of books that engage, challenge, and entertain us.

A setting like this one speaks of the value of books and the nourishment to be found in a literary life. Good books are hard-wrought, but they make possible the intimate communion between reader and writer—one that changes the world, one person at a time.

I’m grateful for libraries, and for the readers, writers, and librarians who make them great.

One way to think of poetry is it’s a making that captures in literary form what might otherwise run down the drain with the dishwater.  Moments.  Images.  A glance.  New ways of seeing something familiar.  Considering that a miniature form might suit my non-poetic soul, this year I turned again to Gail Sher in her lovely book  One Continuous Mistake: Four Nobel Truths for Writers and her suggestion to write a haiku a day.  She suggested six months.  Fearing such a commitment too deep for a dabbler, I tried six days, and even in that brief span found myself growing more aware and open to fresh perceptions.

Sher’s introduction “Guidelines for Beginning Writers of Haiku” is elegant, simple, inviting.  She sketches the three levels on which a haiku works, and suggests a writer capture the “instantaneous now.“  Ah, I thought.  This is welcome discipline in the midst of my “too-much-to-do-in-too-little-time” daily race.Today I noticed the rain puddling—intense colors in the gray light—and a swelling gratitude for reminders to breathe deeply, settle, aim for clarity.

Which poems have you tried writing, or carried with you, to celebrate the month?

As I made the hat, the yarn bled onto my hands, onto the bamboo knitting needles. I called the alpaca farm and spoke to the woman who had sold it to me, who said to saturate the hat in salt water, then heat it in the microwave. Soaked and zapped, the seeping color stopped. Poor babe got a blurry, irradiated hat — proving that the harder I try to get some thing that will be so perfect (Kentucky alpaca for an expat infant in Salem, Mass.), so special (I met the alpaca!), so much beyond the generic, store-bought gift (hand-made, stitch by stitch, hand-dyed yarn), the more, in short, my pride demands I be beyond outstanding (is it pride or some other need?), the farther I have to fall.

And yet the baby wore her hat, her mother sent me a photo of her in it, and I have this part-ball left to knit into something else. And the colors still call to me, though I wonder if at the heart of this ball, the dye might still bleed.

And all this talk of bleeding and of winding takes me back to yarn as a tale, a thread of story coiled around itself and holding its heart hidden in the turning of its lines. Like a poem I’ve put down on the page or the turning of calendar pages reaching back and back. There never was a place that wasn’t tightly coiled and threatening to bleed. Even in the womb I was a curled bud wrapped in a cord of blood. “Wee weare within the wombe a wynding sheete” one of the Renaissance poets said, and when I read that line at nineteen, how I hated this assertion of our death beginning with our life, preceding even breath. Yet in that time of plague and filth and language lovely-harsh enough to catch it all, those poets spoke the truth.

I was a foolish girl, determined to reflect only the sun and deny the taste of earth already in my mouth, the sluggish drift of it in my very veins. I am wound up in this ball of yarn in ways I haven’t even come to yet. Its failing, its tendency to bleed or break under stress, its messy stain of color, even its softness and its lovely mix of shades are in my days. It sits in my wicker basket waiting to be taken up and used; if it is lucky, something will be made of it and that something – hat, afghan – will have its uses, elegant, unforeseen, ordinary, then will be tossed onto the trash, burned up in a fire or ruined in flood, folded into a trunk, a cardboard box, and stuck in some unused space.

As I knit (and when I write, as well), the lived experience and emotions of my days and hours are looped and caught into what I’m making. A scarf or hat can bring back the worries or the musings that overlay its creation, as this ball of yarn holds the October day and the fair at Midway, my daughter home for a weekend, our hours in the blue air, how I tried to just soak it up, to believe I really was there, and maybe tried too hard, as with the hat. This yarn holds my daughter’s tall form, her clear blue eyes, her laugh, and the long black eyelashes of the alpaca tethered in the shade beside the crafter’s tent, the percussive rhythm of the steam engine grinding corn into the grits we bought, the breakfast we shared the next morning, her driving away.

This ball of yarn, these words reach all the way back to her baby self and forward to the baby, then unborn, who has already outgrown her hat — and outward now, as story travels.

I was really too tired to go find them, it takes a lot of energy to go out and round up creativity. So I rested a little once I got to a stopping place. I missed the faint sense of possibilities brushing across my skin, but figured I’d think about that tomorrow. I stared out the window.

But the next morning, in the shower, I found one in my soap. Sometimes it’s when you’re not looking that an idea turns up. For sure I wasn’t giving a thought to anything at all when I picked up my mandarin-scented bar. Maybe ideas like the smell of oranges, or the wholesomeness of soap. Hard to say. But anyway, there it was.

I felt better after that, for a little while. But pretty soon, one idea starts to get heavy. You can feel the weight of all the other companion inspirations it needs that aren’t there. One idea is lonely, and it starts to wonder whether it picked the right place or time to show up. You can hear it asking these questions out loud. It feels terrible.

I took a walk to get away. The nattering was just too annoying and besides, while I had been doing all that work I hadn’t put nearly enough miles on my sneakers. I tend to overrate thought and underrate movement. I needed to bring some balance.

It took maybe three blocks to forget about how my body felt about it and to just be a body walking. Striding along past houses and parked cars I had no agenda, not even exercise. I had nothing to think about and no desire for mental exertion of any kind. I can slip into that brain on vacation mode more easily than I’d like to admit.

So I can’t say I found the next idea. I think it was in the magnolia tree I walked beneath, and it let go of the branch just at the moment I passed by. But wherever it came from, suddenly it was there, and I hadn’t done a thing to make it happen. Just the opposite. Ideas are sneaky that way. They like to drop on your head when you least expect it.

I still wasn’t much in the mood to think about it, but I was happy that the first idea had some company. It made me feel like things would be all right. I kept walking.

If you like the idea of being productive by not thinking,  you might want to read the article, “Bother Me, I’m Thinking” by Jonah Lehrer. It’s about the value to creativity of not paying attention.

I had an A-ha moment in the Louisville Barnes and Noble Bookstore one morning last week. I had gone to Office Depot to print out some copies of a manuscript I am working on. That process was going to take a little while, so I popped over to the bookstore.

I’d never been to this particular store and so everything was a bit turned around. I walked in circles, got lost in the cookbooks and travel books. I went through the aisles looking at this and that, stopping to pick up a cover that intrigued me.  Then I’d move on.  A nice young clerk came up to me at one point and asked me if he could help me find something.

I said “No, but thank you.” I merrily went on my way looking around, walking through a maze of shelves, lost but happy.

After about 30 minutes I walked up to the counter with a magazine, Isabel Allende’s memoir (My Invented Country), a book of W.S. Merwin poems (The Shadow of Sirius) and a Ted Andrews book I’d never read before. The clerk asked me if I had found everything I’d been looking for. “No,” I said, “but it didn’t matter.”

“Well, I could have helped you find it and saved you some time,” he said.   I laughed, saying “Well what would be the point in that? How would I ever have found these books if I knew what I was looking for?!”

I think that is also true about writing. I sit down thinking I know what I’m looking for, but then suddenly something else grabs my attention as I write and I find myself off on a tangent. Sometimes I have to go back and start over, but most of the time I find that being willing to be a little bit lost in the process allows the writing to pleasantly surprise me. The discoveries then, the synchronicities, and the recurring symbols that I hadn’t seen the first time, become a beacon for the writing rather than my imposing a form on it and strangling it into submission.

There are many books on the flow experience including the work of Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. I like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and John Briggs’s work Fire in the Crucible as inspirational texts on the writing process.

I hope you find time to follow your nose and keep writing even though you don’t know where you are going. I think I could adapt a poem by David Wagoner called “Lost”.   He suggests that when lost, one must “Stand still. The forest knows/Where you are. You must let it find you.”

Stand still. Let the words find you.

I often think of this quotation from Fran Lebowitz after I’ve started reading something when I should be doing something else.  “Just a little,” I tell myself.  I’ve glanced at the clock.  Then, I swear, it only felt like a moment.  I’ve only just gotten up a good head of steam on the story.  The clock must be lying!  But there they are again, the rest of my life’s obligations rudely insisting on interrupting a really good read.   For us tough cases, of course it’s not just magazines that lead to books.  Books lead to books.  All the time.

Just the other day, I picked up my first Christmas present to arrive in the mail.  A dear friend sent me Betsy Warland’s Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing. I opened it just about the time a responsible adult, a prudent person, would probably start thinking about making dinner.  “The act of reading is the act of belief,” says Warland.  And she had me.  Within the next few pages, she prompts: “As an exercise, you may find it useful to pull a number of books off the shelf and read only the first page of each.”    What a good idea.  Lots of writing teachers suggest exactly this.  What harm could a first page or two do, just before opening the frozen broccoli?

But because for me reading is like candy—who can stop at just one page?— before long I’ve read the first 50 pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray.   My children come into the kitchen.   The stove is cold.  All they can smell is my afternoon coffee. “Isn’t it time for dinner?” they ask.

It’s Oscar Wilde’s fault.  Not mine.  I hang the blame on the characters Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian himself, and more than that, on (page 36), “Words!  Mere words!  How terrible they were!  How clear, and vivid and cruel!  One could not escape from them.  And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed … to have music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of a lute.  Mere words!  Was there anything so real as words!”

But because kids can’t eat words, they finally convinced me to put the book down.  Dinner got made and eaten.

And today.  Well, today is a new day.  I can try reading the “only the first page” of a couple of books again today.  Before breakfast.